dsorbera wrote:I just pre-ordered from Core Microsystems website. I called and the rep I spoke to said they were shipping out orders from mid November today, and that he expected a shipment of 10 tomorrow and that if I ordered now that I would be in that shipment.

Excellent news for you. Core Microsystems are the distributor for the new Wise SDXC and CFAST 2 3400/3500 cards and the convenient Wise Portable SSD. You might want to take a look at that option and add it to your order.

Ricardo.. you got a ship notice? how the hell did they do that.. we are both in US.. you ordered a week after me and yours ships before.. that is a major screw up. Mine does say sent to warehouse.. but I dont understand how yours would ship before mine.

BM handling pre-order so poorly, I'm (pre-order on 22 April in Thailand) talking about people all over the word that can't even get the product by queue as promise. So USA now talking about order on September OMG.

Justin Jackson wrote:Ricardo.. you got a ship notice? how the hell did they do that.. we are both in US.. you ordered a week after me and yours ships before.. that is a major screw up. Mine does say sent to warehouse.. but I dont understand how yours would ship before mine.

Yes I got the notification last night. I think that you should call them by phone skip the chat. There must be something wrong with your order. You need to call them this Sunday.

The only thing different on my order was that I was originally told that i would receive it by Nov 7 then I called to have my order put on hold because i was on a multi location shoot. I called them again to cancel the hold at the beginning of November, Via chat they told me that I had to wait till the end of December, by phone they said end of November, So there is definitely something wrong with the chat.

No doubt true!! haha. To think I have a drs appt the day it is coming in too.. I will break windows if I see a notice that I was not home to sign for it on my door! Once I get the update that it is in the area I will see if I can just go pick it up.

Sweet.. my camera arrived today!!! Oh..wait.. as usual FedEx did a quick one knock and ran... didnt ring doorbell.. and I am in back of house, so naturally didnt hear their light knock on the door. Now it is on its way back to warehouse, with another attempt tomorrow. WTF!!! Why is it so hard to knock multiple times loudly.. and ring the damn doorbell! Worse.. why can I NOT contact FedEx and have them drop it off to a local FedEx so I can pick it up? Man, so annoying.. I know things are changing.. just too slow for me!!

Hi. For anyone that hasn't received their BMPCC4K I think a good place to look is Kellards .com. I ordered last week and got it yesterday. I kinda feel bad because I've read of a lot of people waiting for months and I got in a week, that's why I decided to post here.

PS. This is my first post in the forums but I've been reading it for a while and you guys have helped a lot in this process of getting a new camera. So thanks for that.

Decided not to wait.. went to fedex and picked it up. Brought it home, put it in the smallrig, tightened it down, put on my fotodiox adapter, 28mm canon ef lens, worked. Formatted SSD (plugged it in AFTER camera was on, it showed up). ProRes LT mode on a 500GB SSD only has 170minutes. Wow. I hope BRAW is similar length a 4K DCI in Q5 or Q0 mode.

Tried my DEC LensRegain, image comes through, havent tried it with and without to see the diff.

First impression.. little scared. This is a beastly upgrade for me. It is not that its big, though with the rig the thing does weigh about 6 or so lbs I guess give or take. But lots of options that I have to learn. Hoping I can figure out how to balance it on my steadicam.

Justin Jackson wrote:Decided not to wait.. went to fedex and picked it up. Brought it home, put it in the smallrig, tightened it down, put on my fotodiox adapter, 28mm canon ef lens, worked. Formatted SSD (plugged it in AFTER camera was on, it showed up). ProRes LT mode on a 500GB SSD only has 170minutes. Wow. I hope BRAW is similar length a 4K DCI in Q5 or Q0 mode.

Congratulations Justin Just do yourself a favor - never record into ProRes LT. It is just too compressed and doesn't do the cameras IQ justice.

Justin Jackson wrote:Is that because they are a small outfit or that they were delayed in getting the product ready for scale production that they decided to release as many as they could as soon as enough came off the production line? I suspect the latter... though I dont think BM is very small these days with the large number of products they sell.

It's true that BMD sells a lot of products, but also look at the demand. The forum participants here probably comprise less than 10% of the BMD users out there, and look at how many people HERE are awaiting Pocket4Ks.

What BM should do, I think.. is announce a product but not a launch date.. until the product is well tested (e.g. 100s of units tested for things like audio input volume, durability, battery life, USB-C SSD connections, etc), then announce availability while having 1000's or more unites ready to ship out.

I got the impression that this is direction BMD wants to go in. At NAB when Grant announced the Pocket4K he also said that he hadn't planned on announcing it then, but there were so many people asking for a successor to the PocketHD that he gave in.

The result is that there were legions of pre-orders long before BMD had the cameras ready to ship. If BMD had waited until it put the cameras into production and then made the announcement, my guess is that it would in the long run end up selling just as many of them, but without the huge surge of pre-orders all at once.

Ricardo, uo? Sorry not sure what that is? When I formatted (to exFat), it showed I had 170m of time available using ProRes LT.

Robert.. plan on using BRAW full time once it is available. For now, just learning. I agree.. would much rather use HQ or RAW, in fact my intention was RAW.. but with BRAW coming I figured Ill just stick to ProRes for now. Will probably do some RAW stuff for fun/learning, but as you know I am a hobbyist, dont have any actual work or anything at this time. I have a whopping lot to learn though being my first pro camera and all.

Malik, I would think that BM probably knows that they would get a good number of orders even if they waited, but as someone trying to build my own services (per our discussion previously), I also think sometimes getting an initial rough idea of interest is helpful. In my case, it would be early feedback to shape the idea up before release to hopefully get even more users. But I could go either way on this particular camera. They knew the original pocket was a big hit, though it took a little while for that one to become the hit it was/is. But then, nobody else was releasing a $1K HD recording camera that recorded prores and raw on SD cards in any form factor (for anything close to that range), so I could see where the skepticism was with that release. 5 years later, BM is a big name in many areas of the industry.. and with all that this camera has on it, I gotta believe they knew they were going to have a monster hit, especially at this price.

Justin Jackson wrote:Ricardo, uo? Sorry not sure what that is? When I formatted (to exFat), it showed I had 170m of time available using ProRes LT.

True, but ProRes LT isn't a production quality codec... you're really compromising your footage by throwing away a LOT of data. That's that LT does... it's lightweight for a reason. ProRes HQ is a much better option... unless you're recording events that require running the camera for an hour or two at a time and don't have an SSD connected.

5 years later, BM is a big name in many areas of the industry.. and with all that this camera has on it, I gotta believe they knew they were going to have a monster hit, especially at this price.

Of course... but if it hadn't been for the NAB announcement, there wouldn't have been any preorders, and BMD could have waited until early November to announce the camera AFTER the resellers had received the first batches.

Which would, of course, have sold out in around six minutes, but still it wouldn't have lead to such a huge backlog.

I still suspect though that while I'm sure BMD expected the Pocket4K to be a hit, the demand probably still exceeded expectation.

As for the 170 minutes of ProRes LT record time: there may be an option there to use the UHD sensor area, but record in HD. If you select record HD but do not select the Window option, you’ll still get the larger field of view in a smaller size.

So your record time can be longer or let you use a higher quality codec like HQ (better) or 422 (good). I’ll record LT for a throwaway test, but not anything I want to keep or publish.

The small US based reseller through which I buy most of my BMD gear let me know that he’s finally getting a shipment of Pocket 4K cameras next week, so my pre-ordered Pocket 4K will be here soon! He also let me know that currently 4 out of the total he’ll be receiving are, as of now, still unsold. Since I’m not sure what BMD’s policies are on posting such info on the forum, if anyone would like the contact information for the reseller, send me a PM and I’ll reply with that info.

As for the 170 minutes of ProRes LT record time: there may be an option there to use the UHD sensor area, but record in HD. If you select record HD but do not select the Window option, you’ll still get the larger field of view in a smaller size.

Definitely the way to go... HD or 2K ProRes HQ is good enough for distribution even to theaters. LT not so much.

Oh.. I am not even close to anything like that. I have no connections, no idea how to even get in to this yet. I just trying to get what gear I can so I "can" do a job if something comes up. I probably only need lav mics to be able to really be able to do something like corporate interview, small commercial (doubtful) or music video. Though in some cases I think I need lighting still.. if not for sure. I was hoping to pop a couple Aputure 120ds in the kit at some point to cover bases. Def need at least the Sigma 18-35 lens. My 28mm canon looks pretty nice though. Havent tried my rokinon yet. It is crazy how close everything is with the 28 though. I think with the DEC booster at .75, it makes the 28, what like a 50 or something right after reduction?

I am truly not sure yet how to use this thing. Like, I figured out I can put a LUT (just the built in ones) on the display, or not. Not sure if it is baked in IF I have it on or not though. Image is def flat looking. When I turn on false colors.. holy crap I get all kinds of blues and greens. No clue how to use that yet. I did put up the grid and save area stuff, I like that up.

So.. ProRes LT.. isnt that better than MP4? I thought it would still be way better than MP4 given that I am only getting like 2.5 hours of record time on a 500GB drive, but my 32GB seems to record 2 or 3 hours (or more?) on my little handy cam in HD.. so at 4K, it would be a bit under 1 hour for 32GB.. so at 16x more space I would hope that the LT is at least a lot better than MP4. Still, I am truly waiting for BRAW at this point. 500GB in 60fps 4K DCI RAW lossless.. 14m of record time or maybe it was 7.. cant remember. WOW. haha. That is nuts. I would think everyone would have at least a 4TB SSD on board if they plan to use a camera for that sort of quality.

Justin Jackson wrote:Oh.. I am not even close to anything like that. I have no connections, no idea how to even get in to this yet. I just trying to get what gear I can so I "can" do a job if something comes up. I probably only need lav mics to be able to really be able to do something like corporate interview, small commercial (doubtful) or music video.

For corporate and commercial you definitely need some lights - for almost anything you need lights if you want to get more than the average available light look.

Justin Jackson wrote: My 28mm canon looks pretty nice though. Havent tried my rokinon yet. It is crazy how close everything is with the 28 though. I think with the DEC booster at .75, it makes the 28, what like a 50 or something right after reduction?

The booster makes the angle of view wider, not narrower. The 28mm without booster in UHD on the PCC4k is like a 57mm on full frame. With the booster it is more like 40mm.

Justin Jackson wrote:I am truly not sure yet how to use this thing. Like, I figured out I can put a LUT (just the built in ones) on the display, or not. Not sure if it is baked in IF I have it on or not though. Image is def flat looking. When I turn on false colors.. holy crap I get all kinds of blues and greens. No clue how to use that yet. I did put up the grid and save area stuff, I like that up.

Time to read the camera user manual Blackmagic has in the support section of their website.

Justin Jackson wrote:So.. ProRes LT.. isnt that better than MP4? I thought it would still be way better than MP4 given that I am only getting like 2.5 hours of record time on a 500GB drive, but my 32GB seems to record 2 or 3 hours (or more?) on my little handy cam in HD.. so at 4K, it would be a bit under 1 hour for 32GB.. so at 16x more space I would hope that the LT is at least a lot better than MP4. Still, I am truly waiting for BRAW at this point. 500GB in 60fps 4K DCI RAW lossless.. 14m of record time or maybe it was 7.. cant remember. WOW. haha. That is nuts. I would think everyone would have at least a 4TB SSD on board if they plan to use a camera for that sort of quality.

First: MP4 is NOT a codec. It is a containerwhich can carry different codecs. What you mean is h.264.ProRes is not better than h.264. ProRes uses less compression (hence the huge file sizes) and it compresses each frame individually, while h.264 compresses groups of frames together (making it much more file size efficient). ProRes does 10bit in 422 or 12bit in 444 while h.264 normally is 8bit 420.

Denny.. sorry you are right.. I always group MP4 and h.264 as the same, but MP4 handles others too.

As for ProRes is not better.. why do you say that if it does 10-bit and 12-bit with less compression than H.264? I would think its not only better due to more image quality, but faster to edit with, at the expense of file size.

Justin Jackson wrote:As for ProRes is not better.. why do you say that if it does 10-bit and 12-bit with less compression than H.264? I would think its not only better due to more image quality, but faster to edit with, at the expense of file size

Because H.264 and Prores are designed to do very different things. ProRes is a high quality acquisition & intermediate format, your looking at maintaining as much quality and inforamtion as possible in a format that isn't highly compressed and can be handled by your edit machine with ease. H.264 however is about trying to compress a final image which is only being decoded for play back not adjustment in the best most efficient possible matter.

Two different tools for two different jobs - both excellent at what they do!

Josh... that is not what I asked though. Denny said ProRes is NOT better than h.264. I asked why not.. given it has more bit depth, better color, better quality, etc? I realize ProRes is acquisition and editing, H.264 is delivery. But why would I not use ProRes for everything but the final phase? Maybe I misunderstood Dennys words there... made me think as if recording in h.264 is better is all.

Given the same bitrate, h.264 would beat ProRes. ProRes is basically MPEG-2 with very high bitrate, individual frame compression only and higher bit depths. The advantage of ProRes at the time of its introduction was that it was lighter on the CPU (because of I-frame only) and less compression which resulted in less artifacts compared to other options.

H.264 offers different profiles and levels. For example the High 4:4:4 profile supports 444 chroma and 9-12bit color depth per channel. It even has lossless coding. The levels restrict frame size and bitrate.Level5.2 allows up to 4096 × 2160 / 60 and together with High 4:4:4 960 Mbit/s.

AVC-Intra Class 4:4:4 for example uses h.264 coding and is I-frame only (like ProRes), supports pixel depths at 10 and 12bits and 4:4:4 chroma at bitrates of 440 Mbit/s for UHD.

I've ordered from Vistek in 30th of october and last week i got a word bac, they where shipping only the resale of may. I don't know where there nw but they only got 2 or 3 per week. So it might be a while before i can receive mine.

I also ordered from Annex Pro, late August. Same situaiton as Rick they have no idea or no news for when they'll recieve any.

I went into Vistek today to pickup a speedbooster, they had told me they had recieved a very small number of camera's but the preorder backlog is somewhere in the hundreds for them so it will likely be a while.

My patience was wearing thin, so I looked south of the border. Kellards, based out of New York is great shop if you want a camera quick. It's strictly an online shop ( no storefront ), my understanding is its run by a few guys through a warehouse setup. I had skeptisim intitally but, you can be rest assured it is legit.

It's a bit of hurdle to get shipping internationally, as far as im concerned they will only ship within the states. So I had arranged for friend to ship to me here in Canada from the states.

Ordered Nov.27, received today. ( Shipped very fast to the address in the states, Dec. 3rd )

The camera doesn't seem to have any out of the ordinary issues. Suffers from the widespread loose battery door issue, actually the battery door was open wide open when I opened it out of the box. Going to do some test shooting in the next few days to make sure image quality and sensor is looking alright, but from initial impression all looks well.